cardiology retractions – Retraction Watch

Exclusive: Probe suggests new retraction awaiting embattled Korean heart doctor

A prominent physician-scientist in South Korea may soon be facing his fourth retraction. Last month, Hui-Nam Pak of Yonsei University was found guilty of duplicate publication, a form of academic misconduct, according to a report from the school’s committee on research integrity Retraction Watch has obtained.

Pak, a cardiologist, has had dozens of papers flagged on PubPeer. As we reported in February, journals pulled two of his papers the previous month after a whistleblower pointed out problems with the articles. One was retracted for “a number of issues related to scientific misconduct,” while the other was a duplicate publication. A third paper by Pak was retracted years earlier after mistakenly being published twice by the same journal.

Our February story triggered a flood of comments, many of them malicious. Some likened whistleblowing to “academic vandalism.” Others asserted that “whistleblowers deserve strong legal penalties” and that “immoral whistleblowers” seemed bent on ruining Pak’s “outstanding career.” Many comments were rejected for not adhering to our commenting policies, in particular making unsubstantiated claims.

The September 12 report from Yonsei University (in Korean) explains that an “informant” reported two of Pak’s papers to the school’s Research Ethics Integrity Committee on March 7.

Prominent Korean heart doctor earns two retractions in a month

Two Korean journals last month pulled papers by a prominent cardiologist at Yonsei University, Professor Hui-Nam Pak, with one retraction notice citing “issues related to scientific misconduct.”

Commenters on PubPeer had raised several concerns about data integrity, “mixed-up” data and “statistical nonsense” in “eNOS3 Genetic Polymorphism Is Related to Post-Ablation Early Recurrence of Atrial Fibrillation,” which was published in 2015 in Yonsei Medical Journal. The journal retracted the paper on January 19, noting that “we have recently become aware of a number of issues related to scientific misconduct.”

The article was coauthored by Patrick Ellinor, acting chief of cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and has been cited six times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Failed to properly register your trial? Just use a different study’s number. Actually, don’t.

Researchers in China have lost a 2019 paper on sedation in people undergoing cardiac surgery after readers complained that the authors had failed to properly register the trial.

The paper, “Effect of Perioperative Administration of Dexmedetomidine on Delirium After Cardiac Surgery in Elderly Patients: a Double-Blinded, Multi-Center, Randomized Study,” appeared in Clinical Interventions in Aging, a Dove Press title.

Last year, a commenter on PubPeer flagged the article, which has been cited 26 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science:

Two abstracts about unapproved heart technology retracted

A group of heart researchers have lost two meeting abstracts after, according to one of the authors, companies said the data were proprietary and couldn’t be published. But it’s not clear the companies did so.

The studies appeared in the journal Heart Rhythm, the official journal of the Heart Rhythm Society, and were presented at the group’s 2021 annual meeting.

The first author on both abstracts was Andrea Natale, a cardiac electrophysiologist at the Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute at St. David’s Medical Center in Austin. We wrote about Natale in 2016, after the researcher lost a paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology – again based on work he presented at the Heart Rhythm Society conference about which he raised concerns over industry meddling. (Natale disputes that he was the first author on the now-retracted posters, for reasons that aren’t clear to us.)

‘They seem to mean business’: Cardiology journal flags papers cited hundreds of times

A European cardiology journal has issued expressions of concern for seven widely-cited papers dating back to 2009 after a reader flagged suspicious images in the articles.

Although the cast of characters changes, the senior author on all seven papers is Chao-Ke Tang, of the First Affiliated Hospital of the University of South China, in Hengyang, Hunan. To date, at least 15 of Tang’s papers have come under scrutiny on PubPeer. Two months ago, for example, Elisabeth Bik posted about “unexpected similarities” in multiple figures in a 2013 paper by Tang and colleagues that appeared in PLoS ONE.

But Sander Kersten, the chair of Nutrition, Metabolism and Genomics and Division of Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, said he believes that the researcher’s output for roughly the past decade is unreliable.

Kersten said his concerns about Tang date back to 2014, when he reviewed — negatively — a manuscript for Atherosclerosis, an Elsevier title, from the researcher:

Former Cleveland Clinic researcher’s papers “more likely than not” included falsified images, says investigation

A former researcher at the Cleveland Clinic who studied cardiac genetics has lost three papers for what an institutional investigation concluded was “more likely than not” a case image falsification.

As we reported last year, the work of Subha Sen, once a highly funded scientist at Cleveland Clinic but who left the institution in 2011, has come under scrutiny on PubPeer (note: a researcher with the same name, but at a different institution, also appears in these search results). With the latest papers, Sen now has ~~nine~~ seven retractions for issues including questions about the integrity of the data and the validity of the images.

The three newest removals involve studies published in the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology between 2004 and 2009. The notices are very similar while referring to different images.

Here’s the statement for the 2005 article, “Inhibition of NF-κB induces regression of cardiac hypertrophy, independent of blood pressure control, in spontaneously hypertensive rats”:

JAMA journal retracts its first paper, on exercise and heart disease

The authors of a 2019 meta-analysis in a JAMA journal on exercise and heart disease have retracted the paper after discovering that a quarter of the studies they’d used in the analysis did not belong.

The retraction is the first for the journal, which had published some 2,800 articles before having to pull one, Frederick P. Rivara, the editor in chief, told Retraction Watch. One in 2,800, we should note, is quite close to the 4 in 10,000 rate of retraction in the overall literature.

The study, from a group at the Universities of Manchester and Brighton, in the United Kingdom, was titled “Accelerometer- and pedometer-based physical activity interventions among adults with cardiometabolic conditions: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” and appeared in JAMA Network Open.

The authors, led by Alexander Hodkinson, looked at 36 randomized clinical trials and found that:

Journal retracts hotly contested paper on vaping and heart attacks

The Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) today retracted a paper it published last year claiming that vaping was linked to heart attacks.

The paper, by Dharma Bhatta and Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco, has faced a barrage of criticism since its publication last June — and Glantz’s claims, in a blog post, that the study was “More evidence that e-cigs cause heart attacks.”

Brad Rodu, a professor at the University of Louisville who comments frequently on vaping, asked the journal to retract the study shortly after it was published. The study, he said, had failed to account for which happened first — heart attacks or vaping. The contretemps was the subject of a July 2019 story by USA Today:

Anversa cardiac stem cell lab earns 13 retractions

Two months after Harvard and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital said they were requesting the retraction of more than 30 papers from a former cardiac stem cell lab there, two American Heart Association journals have retracted more than a dozen papers from the lab.

Yesterday, Circulation retracted three papers, and Circulation Research retracted 10. All 13 were among 15 subjected to expressions of concern last month. Continue reading Anversa cardiac stem cell lab earns 13 retractions

Journals stamp expressions of concern on 15 papers from Anversa’s cardiac stem cell lab

More than four and a half years after questions were first raised about work in a cardiac stem cell lab at Harvard and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a year and a half after the Brigham and Partners Healthcare paid $10 million to settle allegations of fraud in the lab’s data, a month after Harvard the Brigham disclosed that they were calling for the retractions of more than 30 papers from the lab, and three weeks after the NIH paused a clinical trial based on the work, two leading journals have issued an expression of concern about 15 papers from the lab.

But expressions of concern are not retractions, of course. From the notice, in Circulation and Circulation Research, both of which are published by the American Heart Association: Continue reading Journals stamp expressions of concern on 15 papers from Anversa’s cardiac stem cell lab

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